It was recorded (all the talks were), though I haven't seen the file and don't know how good the quality is. We're still figuring out what exactly we're going to do with the materials from the workshop.
>>> We shouldn’t be pushing people who aren’t good at or interested in public communication to put themselves out there more; instead, we should give support and recognition to those who do have the skills and interest to do that work.
Spot on. I'd emphasize it further: I know that it has long been a problem for people interested in doing public outreach, as far as their university jobs go. I wish there was some mechanism whereby, say, writing a book for the general audience counted as much as publishing a journal paper.
Preaching to the choir here, I know, but still, hopefully others start to sing along.
Here's the link for that “survey” article in Nature… a free subscription is required to read the whole thing, but you can read about three quarters of it without…
Prof. Orzel, I’d have liked to see Carroll’s entire white board flow chart. I have a few of questions for you for future posts. Are there experiments or measurements that would give the position of an electron in a hydrogen atom, relative to the nucleus say, at a particular time. The wave function is the supposed to tell us the probability that the electron will have some position or other. I just wonder how you might make a measurement. Suppose you could make such a measurement, and that you could rapidly repeat it, on the same atom. Would you get the electron in random locations? Not a sampled trajectory? You refer to a researcher studying tunneling, and I wonder if there are measurements that ever show a quantum particle in a classically forbidden region. The wave function is not zero there, so there is some probability that the particle is there.
It's been a few years since I really checked in on the field, but I recall some very clever experiments with attosecond lasers and Rydberg atoms that look at things like the orbital period of electrons in very high energy states, using a circularly polarized pulse of light as a kind of "clock" at optical frequencies. People doing that sort of work produce density plots showing the electron distribution on the theory side; I don't recall how they match them to the data, or if they just look at energy levels.
The Steinberg group in Toronto (linked in the piece) has done experiments where they look at the time spent "inside" the barrier by a tunneling particle, by imposing a phase shift on the particle using a laser that's entirely within the forbidden region. There are some arguments about whether this _actually_ constitutes proof of the atoms spending time in the forbidden region, of course, but it's extremely cool.
On another note: any chance that Sean Carroll's talk got taped, and is/will be available? I would love to watch that.
It was recorded (all the talks were), though I haven't seen the file and don't know how good the quality is. We're still figuring out what exactly we're going to do with the materials from the workshop.
Thanks. I can appreciate that it's not just a matter of dumping the file to YT.
>>> We shouldn’t be pushing people who aren’t good at or interested in public communication to put themselves out there more; instead, we should give support and recognition to those who do have the skills and interest to do that work.
Spot on. I'd emphasize it further: I know that it has long been a problem for people interested in doing public outreach, as far as their university jobs go. I wish there was some mechanism whereby, say, writing a book for the general audience counted as much as publishing a journal paper.
Preaching to the choir here, I know, but still, hopefully others start to sing along.
And here's the editorial overview of that article in Nature…
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02346-8?utm_source=x&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=nature&linkId=15996266
Here's the link for that “survey” article in Nature… a free subscription is required to read the whole thing, but you can read about three quarters of it without…
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02342-y
Prof. Orzel, I’d have liked to see Carroll’s entire white board flow chart. I have a few of questions for you for future posts. Are there experiments or measurements that would give the position of an electron in a hydrogen atom, relative to the nucleus say, at a particular time. The wave function is the supposed to tell us the probability that the electron will have some position or other. I just wonder how you might make a measurement. Suppose you could make such a measurement, and that you could rapidly repeat it, on the same atom. Would you get the electron in random locations? Not a sampled trajectory? You refer to a researcher studying tunneling, and I wonder if there are measurements that ever show a quantum particle in a classically forbidden region. The wave function is not zero there, so there is some probability that the particle is there.
Thanks for your thoughts. Bernard Leikind
It's been a few years since I really checked in on the field, but I recall some very clever experiments with attosecond lasers and Rydberg atoms that look at things like the orbital period of electrons in very high energy states, using a circularly polarized pulse of light as a kind of "clock" at optical frequencies. People doing that sort of work produce density plots showing the electron distribution on the theory side; I don't recall how they match them to the data, or if they just look at energy levels.
The Steinberg group in Toronto (linked in the piece) has done experiments where they look at the time spent "inside" the barrier by a tunneling particle, by imposing a phase shift on the particle using a laser that's entirely within the forbidden region. There are some arguments about whether this _actually_ constitutes proof of the atoms spending time in the forbidden region, of course, but it's extremely cool.